{"id":1537,"date":"2013-04-19T05:20:13","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T05:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?p=1537"},"modified":"2013-05-10T02:23:18","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T02:23:18","slug":"errol-morris-and-chris-choy-yale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?p=1537","title":{"rendered":"Errol Morris and Chris Choy @ Yale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have Errol Morris and Chris Choy ever met?\u00a0 Their personal and cinematic styles are so extraordinarily different, it is almost hard to imagine; and yet they both made ground-breaking, innovative courtroom documentaries ca. 1988, which profoundly contributed to the revitalization of documentary practice in the United States: Chris’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?<\/em> (1987, with Renee Tajima-Pe\u00f1a) and Errol’s The Thin Blue Line<\/em> (1988).\u00a0 Both films are audacious, inspirational and ultimately complementary.\u00a0 On an obvious level, everyone agrees that Ronald Ebens killed Vincent Chin: there were numerous eyewitnesses and Ebens himself confessed. \u00a0 For that crime, he received nothing more than probation.\u00a0 If the immediate answer to the film’s title is obvious, a search for deeper answers is far more troubling.\u00a0 In contrast, Randall Adams was convicted of murdering a police officer and faced death until The Thin Blue Line<\/em> effectively proved that Adams was innocent and identified the actual killer. Yin and Yang.\u00a0 I wrote about both these films in an essay: “Film Truth, Documentary and the Law: Justice at the Margins,” University of San Francisco Law Review<\/em> 30:4 (Summer 1996), 963-984. (At present it seems to be available on line here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I can’t take any credit for this, but a mere eight days separated their recent visits to Yale.\u00a0 Chris showed her documentary Sa-I-Gu<\/em> (1993) about the experience of Korean women (mostly small business owners) during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots\/Rebellion<\/a> that was sparked by the Rodney King trial\u2013-and excerpts of forthcoming effort that re-examines that upheaval some 20 years later.\u00a0Sa-I-Gu<\/em> shares a recurrent theme with her other documentaries: Asian Americans have to stop acting like a model minority and stand up for their rights! \u00a0 For his presentation at the Art School, Errol returned to The Thin Blue Line<\/em> and the noir films of the 1940s and early 1950s that inspired him.<\/p>\n

One thing for sure.\u00a0 Until very recently I avoided those posed portraits of eager scholar and famous filmmaker.\u00a0 They have always seemed slightly tacky.\u00a0 I’ve known both Errol and Chris for more than 20 years but never requested a photo op from either one.\u00a0 Obviously, that has just changed.\u00a0 The public diary, narcissistic ruminations and inevitable self-promotion of this website is certainly one explanation.\u00a0 But it also has something to do with the rapid passage of time and being ready to document at least one instance in our associations.\u00a0 So somewhat shamelessly here they are–along with the posters for Chris and Errol’s visits:<\/p>\n

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photo by Victoria Chu<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Christine_Choy_flyer\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\n\"MorrisatYaleposter\"<\/a>\"with<\/a><\/p>\n

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As readers of my website know, I have been working on a documentary: Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch<\/em> (2013).\u00a0 It’s been shown as a work in progress at several universities and even a few odd classes largely devoted to documentary.\u00a0 It all came about because my own failed efforts to get Errol down to Yale. Fate had something else in mind: a backdoor documentary. Carina Tautu and I went up to his Cambridge offices to record a conversation with Errol and bring it back down to show at a festival of his films, which I programmed.\u00a0 The rest, as they say, is history–or friendly persistence on my side and a certain graciousness on Errol’s.\u00a0 Since our visit, he has made two appearance on the Yale campus– under someone else’s auspices.\u00a0 Once again this has all been to the good. I haven’t had to worry about hosting and both times showed up at his events with video camera in hand.\u00a0 My goal has simply been to have some kind of lasting record of his speculations on cinema and the nature of our universe.\u00a0 In fact, Errol asked his hosts\u00a0at the Art School if someone could record his conversation as he was walking into the “pool.”\u00a0 So I quickly solved that problem. I could easily begin to see this as one of my responsibilities.<\/p>\n

\"Morris,??,Musserwcamera\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Among the various high points of his talk, Errol shared his “Fuck You Theory of Art” with the MFA art students, where he had a ready audience.\u00a0 In a way, many of the filmmakers that have fascinated me practice this in some shape or form. Chaplin–for sure.\u00a0 Oscar Micheaux–certainly. No filmmaker has ever made a film that said “Fuck You” to his star more than Micheaux did to Paul Robeson in Body and Soul <\/em>(1925). And in a different way, much could be said about Ernst Lubitsch and Lady Windermere’s Fan,\u00a0<\/em>released in the same month. On this particular occasion, Morris focused on Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Evangelist Matthew<\/em>. EM sees himself as being in this tradition: certainly it is crucial for understanding many of his individual films as well as his body of work as a whole.\u00a0 One should emphasize perhaps that the other side of this “Fuck You” approach is incredible rigor and discipline.<\/p>\n

Well if Errol will let me, I will post that section of his talk sometime in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have Errol Morris and Chris Choy ever met?\u00a0 Their personal and cinematic styles are so extraordinarily different, it is almost hard to imagine; and yet they both made ground-breaking, innovative courtroom documentaries ca. 1988, which profoundly contributed to the revitalization of documentary practice in the United States: Chris’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987, with Renee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[256,115,41,101,116,117],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1537"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1540,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions\/1540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}